Production of referring expressions : preference trumps discrimination

Abstract

When referring to an object using a description, speak- ers need to select properties which jointly distinguish it from any potential distractors. Previous empirical and computational work addressing this content selec- tion process has highlighted the role of both (i) the dis- criminatory power of properties of a referent, i.e. how many of the distractors in a domain each property ex- cludes; (ii) how inherently salient or preferred a property is. To date, there has been no attempt to systematically investigate the trade-o between these two potentially competing motivations. This paper investigates experi- mentally the extent to which speakers take discrimina- tory power versus preference into account during con- tent selection for reference production. Our results sug- gest that discriminatory power in fact plays a relatively unimportant role. We discuss the implications of this for computational models of reference production.